On Wed, 14 May 2008 06:38 Geoffrey Purcell wrote:

>Oh, yes, I forgot to mention a couple of other obvious points:-  tubers did 
>become a significant part of the diet once the Neolithic came around, given 
>the evidence, so it's quite possible  that Australian Aborigines acquired that 
>trait at the time.  Besides, last I checked, the Aborigines only entered 
>Australia towards the end of the Palaeolithic.

For the sake of categorization, we say that the Palaeolithic 
ended and the Neolithic began 10,000 ya.

But the terms Palaeolithic and Neolithic are not geological 
epochs, they are used to describe changes in the lifestyles
of Homo sapiens. So hunter-gatherers in Papua New Guinea 
and the Fertile Crescent and a few other locations shifted from
their Paleolithic lifeways to Neolithic lifeways 10,000 ya.

In other locations, the shift took longer. Australia was one of
those places where the shift occurred relatively late (and it
took an invasion of Europeans to spread it across the 
continent). Incidentally, the Aborigines may have "entered 
Australia towards the end of the Palaeolithic", but their 
was somewhere between 65,000 and 45,000 ya. This is earlier
than the arrival of Homo sapiens in western Europe or
the Americas. In fact scientists are still trying to work
out how it was that the ancestors of the Australians scooted
over there from Africa so relatively quickly/early.

I should just mention the Tasmanian Aborigines here. They
were cut off from mainland Australia when the last Ice Age 
ended and the seas rose. During their period of isolation
they gave up the use of fire and lived on raw mutton birds,
mutton bird eggs, crustacea etc. They were not nomadic
(down there it snows every winter and the few caves
contain middens built up over millennia), but they were
certainly Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers through and through 
until about 1800 - regardless of what point in the Neolithic
the majority of Homo sapiens were in.

Keith